Inside The Rock and Vin Diesel’s Beef

Saturday, November 22, 2025

Who doesn't love a good old-fashioned beef between two movie stars? I sure do. If you agree, we have the story of what really went down between Vin Diesel and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson during the long and complicated history of the Fast and Furious franchise. Each actor has addressed their much-publicized disdain for the other in the press, but we never knew the finer details...until now. Read all about it below.

—Brady Langmann, senior entertainment editor

Plus:

Inside Vin Diesel and The Rock's Blockbuster Beef on Fast and Furious

In this excerpt from Welcome to the Family, author Barry Hertz gets to the bottom of the infamous feud—which culminated in a showdown between the men in one star's trailer.

Only Chris Morgan's therapist can answer the question as to whether the screenwriter's inspiration for Fast 8 (2017)—in which Dom and Hobbs once again become mortal enemies—was, on a not-so-subconscious level, mined from the real-life tensions between Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson.

In one way, having Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's lawman Luke Hobbs team up with the abandoned and betrayed crew of Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto after the career criminal goes rogue was a neat flip on Fast Five's (2011) original dynamic, which introduced Hobbs as the family's aggressor. But anyone even tangentially following the franchise's off-screen drama could see how art was starting to mirror life, however intentional or not. And while Fast 8 ultimately and rather tidily resolves the animosity between Dom and Hobbs, the real feud between Hollywood's two biggest slabs of blockbuster beef was far from over.

READ THE STORY

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I Tried the Oldest Whisky Ever Bottled. It Was Nothing Like I Expected.

At an October tasting at Christie's, the luxury auction house in New York City, well-heeled potential customers and members of the media, including me, were about to taste the oldest whisky ever bottled.

Artistry in Oak, the 85-year-old single-malt Scotch distilled at The Glenlivet and released by independent bottler Gordon & MacPhail, sat on a pedestal covered by a velvet cloth. Behind it, a dramatic video showed storm clouds moving across a darkened sky. When the cloth was whisked off, the room burst into deferential applause. Though I was enjoying the occasion—one that few will ever get to experience, not to mention afford—I had to wonder: Would a whisky this old taste any good?

By Jonah Flicker

The Lost Art of Cigar Smoking

My day doesn't start until I light my cigar. Sure, the day begins with my partner and me feeding and dressing our two-year-old and sending her off to daycare. Afterward, I grab a coffee and pastry and set myself up on the benches that rim Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Then my day starts with a cigar.

The cut, the light, the draw. The billowing smoke. The ritual and the nicotine set me at ease. My writerly peers who lean on performance-enhancing drugs tend to favor weed, but I'm old-school with my preference for tobacco. "Cigars are the perfect literary drug," the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides said in his 2011 "The Art of Fiction" interview with The Paris Review. "I understand why Mann, Freud, and so many durable people smoked cigars. It really focuses the mind."

Smoking tobacco puts you on the periphery. In the case of my morning ritual, on the actual periphery, because it's illegal in New York City to smoke inside the park; it also puts you outside the mainstream.

By Mychal Denzel Smith